Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh
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locations and personal relationships, to renew ties with my family and friends, and to make new connections. This work is also steeped with the resilience of many wiser and older women, which they imparted, often indirectly but always generously, across the continents and the phases of my life.
Above all I thank my mother. As I have waded through this material and learned about how women survived, perhaps even thrived, I also learned to appreciate her extraordinary ambition and drive for me. Her innumerable stories and indefatigable passion for family history, which steeped my childhood, have undoubtedly also helped shape this book, some in ways I may not yet be aware of. Her love of art moved me since before I can remember. And her appetite for things, for their acquisition and care, I have had pause to humbly reevaluate over the course of this project!
I have become acutely aware that the long and arduous process of preparing a book, much like making a kantha at home, is a patchwork of time stolen from family and household responsibilities. Over the decade devoted to kantha, Rai became my loyal cheerleader, and with Branavan, she took on many of my responsibilities to see this book to life. Kabir rejuvenated me with his hunger and exuberant appetite for another generation of children’s books.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Spelling Bengali words in English is vexing because Bengali has no standardized ways of transliterating, perhaps with good reason, as it is not only a Sanskritic vernacular, but one amply filled out with Persian, Arabic Turkish, English, Portuguese, and even a handful of Danish terms over the past centuries. I have avoided the standard Sanskrit system of transliteration with diacritics in order to try to retain the flavor of the local Bengali and to keep the text accessible to a larger audience. To that end, I am inclined to use the Bengali version ashon (seat/mat) rather than follow the typical Sanskrit version, āsana. However, I have also refrained from transcribing Bengali pronunciation into English with precision, as it can become unfamiliar, even to Bengali readers. (The three sibilant sounds ś,
Place names for cities, towns, villages and districts are standardized in accordance with current popular usage, for example, Braj for Vraja or Braja and Brindaban for Vrindavan. However, I use Calcutta for the most part to refer to the colonial period of the history of the city, and Kolkata for the recent past decade, recognizing the change of its name at the governmental level.
Non-English terms are explained in the context that they appear, glossed parenthetically in the body of the text at first use.
All translations from Bengali into English are mine, unless otherwise noted.
Introduction
Kantha, Comfort, and Canon
IREAD THE VELVETEEN RABBIT AND STORIES LIKE IT OVER THE YEARS AS I snuggled under the covers with my children at bedtime.1
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time.
This wasn’t a story from my own childhood, but it could easily have been, as I grew up in an era quite different from the glittering worlds of post-liberalization India. It was a time when signs of generations of wear and respectability were apparent on the shabby, genteel facades of houses and on white school uniforms that remained obstinately off-white, when potato peels were carefully saved to be cooked into a delicacy with a sprinkling of poppy seeds, and old, yellow-gray cloth was mended and stitched into something new by grandmothers and mothers. In hindsight, I realize that part of me became real through these ordinary, everyday intimacies.
All of that is changing now in Kolkata/Calcutta, and I too have moved on, but kantha that are created from old cloth carry that peculiar thickness of touch and wear, emotions, experiences, and memories—like worn stuffed toys—among the people I have encountered and worked with over the past decade of living with this book.2 Kantha blankets and mats become real as children wiggle in their warmth, extending their presence with sighs and sniffles, the drool of deep sleep, or the consternation of “accidents” (fig. I.1). Kantha embody their human companions, participating in the rituals that construct ordinary lives (figs. I.2, I.3, I.4). They constitute the most intimate everyday realities not only of their users, but also of those who take care of kantha, those who take pride in their family’s distinctive practices, and those who pause to revel occasionally in their remembrances. Kantha, in anecdotes, can meander from the quotidian to the heirloom, with various valences in between. And all kantha, of course, are malleable, potentially moving with ease and subtlety, often unremarked, across these registers of everyday life and perception. They share in the slipperiness, even capriciousness, of ordinary things that are so often taken for granted, much like stuffed bunnies.
Such ephemeral qualities inevitably make these objects obdurate as well. They cohabit multiple temporalities, from the cloth that soaks up tears to the memories that cause more to well up. They can be multigenerational, used for one baby and then put away, sometimes until the next generation arrives (figs. I.2, I.3, 1.11). They refuse to be confined to bedroom interiors or home altars. They can move inside and out with the weather (figs. I.4, I.5, I.6). Some undertake ceremonial journeys from one home to another